But, when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, there are basic metrics you should always keep in mind. This way you can focus on the metrics that matter most when determining how successful your campaigns are and how well your social media strategy is performing. Ultimately, you want to be able to use these metrics to prove the impact your social media strategy has had on your overall business. Because, remember – social media is just one part of your marketing strategy.
Key Performance Indicators
Measuring the right social media metrics is a science and tools like Twitter Analytics or Facebook Insights will help you dive into your data. Free tools like these or paid solutions can help you consistently track your performance. But in a sea of metrics, which ones are most important?
We broke it down to 5 must-have categories:
1. Awareness: Number of Followers, Reach, and Impressions
If your goals are brand awareness or how people perceive your brand, these are important metrics to follow.
The number of followers you have is a vanity metric. Although it’s important, you may also have a large number of followers with no engagement or reach. Take a deeper dive into your impressions and reach to see if your content is successful. Impressions are how many times your post shows up in someone’s timeline. While reach is the number of unique viewers your post could have.
To really understand how well your content is performing, you will want to take into account engagement. For example, your post could have high impressions, but a low engagement number – meaning your post wasn’t interesting enough for your audience to take action.
2. Engagement: Clicks, Likes, Shares, and Comments
Engagement will monitor how connected your audience is with your content and the effectiveness of it. An engaged audience will interact with your business through clicks, likes, shares, or comments.
The higher the engagement rate, the more responsive your audience is to your content types. Engagement can be broken down into:
- Likes, shares, comments, and etc.: These are individual engagement metrics.
- Post engagement metric: The number of engagements divided by impression or reach. A high rate means people who see the post find it interesting enough to like, share, or comment.
- Account mentions: These can indicate good brand awareness, especially if they are mentions that aren’t part of a reply.
3. Share of Voice: Volume and Sentiment
Share of voice will show how many people are talking about your business compared to your competitors. This is often an ongoing goal, because you’ll always want to be on top of how well your business is doing against your competitors.
4. ROI: Referrals and Conversions
If you are a business that offers a product or service to consumers, this is an important metric to follow.
Referrals are how someone lands on your website. Often in your tools, they will be broken down by sources. Conversions are when someone actually purchases something from your website.
When looking at your referrals and conversions, you will also take into consideration your click-through rate (CTR) in your ads and posts. The higher the CTR, the more effective your ad or post is. You can monitor your CTR in your emails, paid advertisements, landing page links, social media, website buttons, and any other call-to-action buttons. Hand in hand with CTRs is the bounce rate. That is the percentage of visitors who click on a link in your posts, or ads, or emails, only to quickly leave the page without taking action. Take a look at these metrics to better understand how well your content is performing.
5. Customer Care: Response Rate and Time
Last but not least is the customer’s experience with your business.
Response rate and time monitors how quickly your team responds to messages and how many they respond to. You’ll want to make sure that your customers are being replied to in a timely manner. It’ll help with your overall customer satisfaction and conversions.
This is just an overview of the essential metrics that matter for most businesses. A combination of these will provide you with the visibility you need of your social media performance and most importantly, of the impact to your bottom-line. Because at the heart of great marketing is the data to back it up.